Wanna win a full set of the new Pocket Guide books? My friend and fellow writer Matthew Paul Turner is giving away two sets of the three books (Pocket Guides to the Bible, the Afterlife, and Sainthood). All you have to do is comment on this post by finishing this sentence:

It’s worth stopping by for the giveaway, but MPT also offered a fun interview. About half of the questions were from him, and the other half were from his followers on Twitter. So I get to answer a lot of questions about writing, publishing, the creative process, and why writers like me are total egomaniacs.

Other discussion items include details about O Me of Little Faith and this answer to a question about the subjects of my new books:

As for the Afterlife, well, don’t we all want to know what awaits us after we die? Almost every culture has some idea about what’s beyond this life, and some of those ideas can be outright horrifying and weird. And horrifyingly weird. There’s also the question of the Christian ideas of heaven and hell. How much of our beliefs about those come from the Bible? How much come from culture and art and literature? Is that MercyMe song correct when it says I’ll dance before Jesus? Because seriously, that would feel really awkward to me. I only know the two-step and the backspin. And ethereal harp music is a horrible accompaniment for either of those. Anyway, our Christian afterlife beliefs have been shaped by a lot of different forces, and only one of those was the Bible. I thought it would be fun to explore that, along with all the fascinating afterlife mythology of other world religions.

Thanks, MPT, for an interesting interview, and for doing the giveaway.

• Jason Boyett writes about Saints, Afterlife, and the Bible